Waves Passing in the Night: Walter Murch in the Land of the Astrophysicists

afoot.

PART ONE

Distant Music

MURCH LAUNCHES THE most recent iteration of his PowerPoint lecture (actually, these days he uses Keynote, though I myself have been hearing versions of this lecture for a good dozen years now, whenever I happened to be engaging Murch on a wide variety of other topics) by noting how there was a time, not that long ago, when the sort of thinking he is engaging in here (far from outlandish) was the very epitome of orthodox. From Pythagorean antiquity through the Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance, all learned gentlemen (and they were all mainly gentlemen) were steeped in the fourfold classical curriculum known as the quadrivium, which is to say, arithmetic (pure number), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time).

The quadrivium: the font of classical learning

From there, Murch goes on to project Galileo’s iconic dashed drawing of 1610, documenting the latter’s famous telescopic sighting of Jupiter with its four moons (all named after the Olympian god’s human lovers: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto).

Galileo’s drawing of Jupiter and its moons, 1610

Murch then jumps to a deep-space telescopic image, from 2008, of a star identified as HR8799 (129 light years away, sixty million years old) with three of its planets (labeled b, c, and d, orbiting 68, 38, and 24 astronomical units distant, respectively, from the star itself). (An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance of the Earth from our sun, such that in the HR8799 system, the planet c is as far from its sun as Pluto is from ours: HR8799’s is a very large system indeed, one of the main reasons we may even have been able to spot it at all.)

Noting how the actual circuits of orbiting bodies are almost always elliptical—as with Mercury, whose maximum distance from the Sun is 70 million km and minimum distance is 46 million km—Murch explains that he will be following the standard convention of citing only the average distance of the circling body across its entire orbit, the so-called semi-major axis. Whereupon he projects a graphic representation of three concentric circles around the central star HR8799 at their correct relative distances, adding a fourth for a more recently discovered planet, e, the inmost one at 14.5 AUs, and then slides a similar representation, corrected for scale, of the relative orbits of those four moons around Jupiter (at 0.0028, 0.0045, 0.0072, and 0.0130 AUs respectively). And the four sets of concentric rings line up almost exactly, one atop the next—as do the relatively scaled orbits of Earth, Mars, and the asteroid Ceres (at 1.0, 1.52, and 2.77 AUs from the Sun respectively), when he thereupon slides in those.

Comparative relative orbits of the satellites of the Sun, Jupiter, and HR-8799

An audible gasp invariably rises up from the audience right about here. At which point, Murch projects his next slide, the single word APOPHENIA in white against a black background. The widespread tendency, he goes on to explain, of human beings to see patterns where there are no patterns. Even Murch’s cautionary provisos are elegantly framed.

WALTER SCOTT MURCH

was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up there, in the Morningside Heights district surrounding Columbia University on the Upper West Side, the son of Katharine Scott, a secretary at the Ethical Culture School and subsequently Riverside Church, and Walter Tandy Murch, the eminent Canadian American painter.

Walter Tandy Murch, Carburetor, 1957

His painter father’s parents had been Toronto retail jewelers with a passion for music, and their three other sons became a conductor, a pianist, and a singer; but when the fourth, Walter Tandy, evinced a certain hesitation over the prospect of a lifelong career as a violinist, his mother suggested he might instead attend art school. The boys were all going to be artists, as Walter Scott recently recalled in a monograph essay about his painter father, and that was that. Walter Tandy took to painting with considerable gusto and moved down to New York City in 1927 to study at the Art Students League, remaining there owing to its more vibrant scene; with the passing decades, however, he arced away from that scene’s ever-growing abstractionist tendencies. Following on from the urgings of his close friend (and fellow relative outlier) Joseph Cornell, Murch was by the late forties one of the few realists in gallerist Betty Parsons’s stable (which otherwise included the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Ellsworth Kelly).

Walter Tandy Murch, Sewing Machine, 1953

Murch’s realism, however, was of a highly distinctive sort (described at the time as magic realism). Frequently the central focus of the painting, his son would later recall, was a cast-off mechanical object from the past—a lock, a clock, a carburetor, an air filter—and he often stripped it of its casing skin, so that we were allowed to peer into its hidden skeletal structure. He once described the thrill of prying open an ancient door lock mechanism and discovering a moth’s cocoon inside: ‘I felt as if I was Howard Carter prying open King Tut’s tomb,’ he laughed. The resultant surrealistically tinged still lifes were conveyed across a subdued warm palette of reds and yellows and ochres, with an exceptionally narrow depth of field (perhaps owing to the fact that he was almost blind in one eye, due to a teenage football accident, such that the world through that eye was experienced as if seen through translucent plastic).

clockwise from left:

Walter Tandy Murch, Katharine Murch, Walter Murch at fourteen with his sister, Louise

I don’t paint the object anyway, the son recalls his father once telling him. "I paint the air between my eye and the object." Elaborating, the son noted how

Turning air into paint—thinking of air as a transparent jellied matrix, molding itself around the objects, and then somehow transferring that insubstantial three-dimensional mold to the two-dimensional surface of the canvas—was my father’s characteristically metaphysical way of coming to terms with (or nimbly sidestepping) the question: where does the meaning lie? Is it in the reality of the objects represented? Or is it the transubstantiated reality of this new object, the painting? Or somewhere else?

For his own part, in 1954, almost as soon as tape recorders first became commercially available to the general public, the painter’s son, at around age eleven, became obsessed with audio-recording the world. As he recalls in the same essay, I began recording random sounds in my local environment, at different speeds, then playing them backwards, upside down, back to front, and chopping the tape into bits and scotch-taping them back together in a different order. It was a kind of enthusiastic model-building—the sort of rabbit holes that twelve-year-olds fall into, and mostly soon pop out of. Then, one afternoon the following year, he turned on his radio and heard sounds that for a moment he thought were coming from his tape recorder, so similar were they to his own audio collages. The thrilling (to him) noises turned out to be an instance of the new-fangled musique concrète: a recording made in France by composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. It was astonishing for me to find out that people—grownups!—in France were doing the same kinds of things I had discovered for myself accidentally, and it cemented in place a love of recording and mixing the sounds of the real world which has now persisted for sixty years. The private hermetic obsession of his twelve-year-old self turned out to lay the foundation for his entire professional life.

Cage

A few years after that, his father took Walter to hear a lecture by John Cage, who would become another hero—Cage, the exacting polymorphous minimalist who would subsequently write:

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound.

Sound acting across the surround, rebounding through the space between the object and the ear—that would become another of Walter’s passions.

First, though, he headed off for college at Johns Hopkins, where he majored in nineteenth-century art history and Romance languages (French and Italian), graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1965, after which he, along with classmates Matthew Robbins (the future director-screenwriter) and Caleb Deschanel (the future cinematographer), launched themselves out west (Walter cruising cross-country on his BMW R50 motorcycle with his new bride, a strikingly elegant and ribald young English nursing student named Muriel Ann—though everybody called her Aggie—almost as tall as he was, sometimes even taller, clinging to his back).

Newlyweds Walter and Aggie, westward-bound, 1965

The boys were enrolled in the University of Southern California graduate film school, during a veritable golden age for film studies, where they joined up with the likes of John Milius (the truculent future screenwriter, parodied years later by way of the John Goodman character in The Big Lebowski) and George Lucas. At the same time, Francis Ford Coppola and Carroll Ballard were studying across town at University of California–Los Angeles (these in turn being the same years that Martin Scorsese was matriculating at that other American powerhouse, the film school at New York University). At one point, casting about for the subject for a fifteen-minute student film, George Lucas asked Robbins and Murch if he could film one of their unproduced scripts, the story that became THX 1138. (Only many years after that did Murch come to realize that their dystopian tale dovetailed almost exactly with the plot and ethos of E. M. Forster’s astonishingly prescient 1909 novella, The Machine Stops, which Murch insists they had not yet encountered at the time.)

The Zoetrope gang, San Francisco, 1969.

Coppola at top of ladder, Ballard mid-ladder, Milius at bottom of ladder, Lucas behind them by window, Murch with pitchfork

After graduating from USC, Murch (along with Lucas) ventured up to San Francisco to join Coppola in founding the Zoetrope collaborative, a conspicuously un-Hollywood studio venture. (Indeed that’s precisely why they’d all headed up to San Francisco, to get away